From ancient metropolises like Pueblo Bonito and Tenochtitlán to the twenty-first century Oceti Sakowin encampment of NoDAPL water protectors, Native people have built and lived in cities—a fact little noted in either urban or Indigenous histories. By foregrounding Indigenous peoples as city makers and city dwellers, as agents and subjects of urbanization, the essays in this volume simultaneously highlight the impact of Indigenous people on urban places and the effects of urbanism on Indigenous people and politics. The authors—Native and non-Native, anthropologists and geographers as well as historians—use the term “Indian cities” to represent collective urban spaces established and regulated by a range of institutions, organizations, churches, and businesses. These urban institutions have strengthened tribal and intertribal identities, creating new forms of shared experience and giving rise to new practices of Indigeneity. Some of the essays in this volume explore Native participation in everyday economic activities, whether in the commerce of colonial Charleston or in the early development of New Orleans. Others show how Native Americans became entwined in the symbolism associated with Niagara Falls and Washington, D.C., with dramatically different consequences for Native and non-Native perspectives. Still others describe the roles local Indigenous community groups have played in building urban Native American communities, from Dallas to Winnipeg. All the contributions to this volume show how, from colonial times to the present day, Indigenous people have shaped and been shaped by urban spaces. Collectively they demonstrate that urban history and Indigenous history are incomplete without each other.

This book presents fundamental and applied research aimed at the development of smart cities across India. Based on the exploration of an extensive array of multidisciplinary literature, this book discusses critical factors of smart city initiatives: management and organization, technology, governance, policy, people and communities, economy, infrastructure, and natural environment. These factors are broadly covered under the integrative framework of the book to examine the vision and challenges of smart city initiatives. The book suggests directions and agendas for smart city research and outlines practical implications for government professionals, students, research scholars and policy makers. A lot of work is happening on smart cities as it is an upcoming area of research and development. At international level, and even in India, the concept of smart cities concept is a hot topic at universities, research centers, ministries, transport departments, civic bodies, environment, energy and disaster organizations, town planners and policy makers. This book provides ideas and information to government officials, investors, experts and research students.

About the Book: The collection of stories in this book presents to you a graphic retelling of the rise and fall of some ancient cities of India. Packed with mythological tales and historical anecdotes each story lets you re-discover ancient India in a new light. Written in light story-telling fashion, the book will make you time-travel to the past to many mythical and imperial cities in different historical eras. Scattered across ancient undivided India and the subcontinent, each story traces a city of the past and how its destiny had unfolded over time. The stories in this book also present battle-scars, deluges and changing political scenarios, as well as the peaceful co-habitation and wonderful spread of religions, learning and culture. Tales of legendary kings, fierce warfare, spiritual leaders, foreign chroniclers and world travellers make these ancient cities come alive in this collection.About the Author: A post-graduate in English Literature from Kolkata, Sayan is an occasional author and a FinTech corporate trainer by profession. An avid traveller and reader, Sayan's avocation is writing. Sayan has published two novels "Friendship Calling" in 2013 and "A Case of Connections" in 2016, both based on his true-life experiences. Sayan continues to write short stories on his blog and as guest writer on other blogs. Sayan has keen interest in Indian history and mythology and Ancient Cities of India is his first attempt at re-telling and writing based on history. Sayan can be reached on his email: [email protected] and Twitter @Sayan74.

Economic corridors—ambitious infrastructural development projects that newly liberalizing countries in Asia and Africa are undertaking—are dramatically redefining the shape of urbanization. Spanning multiple cities and croplands, these corridors connect metropolises via high-speed superhighways in an effort to make certain strategic regions attractive destinations for private investment. As policy makers search for decentralized and market-oriented means for the transfer of land from agrarian constituencies to infrastructural promoters and urban developers, the reallocation of property control is erupting into volatile land-based social conflicts. In Shareholder Cities, Sai Balakrishnan argues that some of India's most decisive conflicts over its urban future will unfold in the regions along the new economic corridors where electorally strong agrarian propertied classes directly encounter financially powerful incoming urban firms. Balakrishnan focuses on the first economic corridor, the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, and the construction of three new cities along it. The book derives its title from a current mode of resolving agrarian-urban conflicts in which agrarian landowners are being transformed into shareholders in the corridor cities, and the distributional implications of these new land transformations. Shifting the focus of the study of India's contemporary urbanization away from megacities to these in-between corridor regions, Balakrishnan explores the production of uneven urban development that unsettles older histories of agrarian capitalism and the emergence of agrarian propertied classes as protagonists in the making of urban real estate markets. Shareholder Cities highlights the possibilities for a democratic politics of inclusion in which agrarian-urban encounters can create opportunities for previously excluded groups to stake new claims for themselves in the corridor regions.

India’s urban transition has, of late, acquired multiple narratives. It is said to be rapid, moderate, slow, messy, and hidden. What underpins such multiple narratives is the central theme of the study, State of the Cities: India. Making use of an analytical framework that permits an examination of the shifts in the pace and pattern of India’s urbanisation over a period of time, this study takes an in-depth look at the evidence on three of its key dimensions: the demographics, the economy, and the status of infrastructure and the environment. Some of the key questions that this study seeks responses to are: Is India’s in the post-libarlisation period any different? Does it show the effect of the changes in the macroeconomic parameters of the post-1991 period? Is it more or less productive and inclusive and environmentally secure? Is it spatially more equal or unequal? Does it in any way signal an inflection point in India's urban transition? Drawing from the analysis of the evidence comparable over time, the study spotlights several interesting questions: what would, for example, explain the acceleration in the pace of urbanisation under conditions of low economic growth and its moderation under conditions of high economic growth? What factors would explain a fall in the rate of growth in the urban share of gross domestic product (GDP) at such a low level of urbanisation, especially the GDP accruing from the manufacturing sector? This study makes a strong case for evidence-based assessment of India’s urban transition, rather than to continue to commit, as many of us do, to the long-held, but specious narrative that India is in the midst of rapid urbanisation.